IRISH AMERICA

The Irish Oil
Dave O’Reilly loves oil.
It is why he became a
chemical engineer. He
doesn’t know how exactly
this love came about –
he wasn’t influenced by any American
westerns featuring Texas wild-catters
that populated the fledgling Irish television
network RTE in the 60s. And he
didn’t get it from his father who worked
as a buyer in the men’s department at
Arnotts store in Dublin, or his mother
who migrated from Co. Kerry to Dublin
in the late 1930s to join the civil service
– one of the few job options for Irish
women of that era. The closest he came
to any kind of engineering was when as
a youngster he used to visit his uncle
who worked for the aluminum factory in
Nenagh, Co. Tipperary, on his way
southwest to his mother’s family in
Kerry on summer holidays.
But from an early age O’Reilly wanted
to be an oilman, and he has lived his
dream.
It was serendipitous that the first time
Chevron recruited in Ireland, O’Reilly
was graduating from University College
Dublin. He left for the Chevron plant in
California soon after. Forty years later,
he is still with the company. He started
with Chevron Research as a process
engineer and, after stepping in as a manager
during a strike in 1973, a series of
positions with increasing responsibility
followed. He was named general manager
of Chevron’s refinery at El Segundo,
California, in 1986. In 1991 he was
elected a vice president of Chevron
Corp., and by 1994, he was president of
Chevron Products Co., responsible for
the company’s U.S. refining and market-
38 IRISH AMERICA DECEMBER/JANUARY 2009